Internet Business Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Everyone wants better search engine rankings and more organic search traffic. More traffic brings increased revenues and makes your site more valuable. But you won’t get that traffic if your site is stuck in Google’s supplemental results. Fortunately, we’ve rounded up the tips to break free!

What are supplemental results?

Google has two content indexes. Supplemental results are the B-list. As Google explains, there are fewer restrictions on the supplemental index.

But supplemental results show up after results from the main index. Also, Google doesn’t regularly update the content in the supplemental index. In other words, it’s not somewhere you want your pages.

Jim Boykin even coined the term “Google Hell” for this index. We clearly want to keep your pages out of there.

Are my pages in supplemental results?

A quick way to check your site is to enter this search at Google (instead of “example.com” enter your site’s name, such as “google.com”):

site:www.example.com * -asdf

You should now see some pages that say “Supplemental Result”

How to get out of Google’s Hell

Link to your pages. A page without a link to it is considered “orphaned,” and Google doesn’t look too kindly upon that. Spread the link love around your own site and get links from other sites. Don’t just focus on the home page, since every page needs its own Google juice. Google’s own Matt Cutts claims this is the best way out of supplemental results.

Remove duplicate content. To be on the A-List, you need unique content. If you stole somebody else’s content, shame on you. If you’re duplicating your own content, stop. WordPress users should use post excerpts everywhere.

Hunt down copiers. Somebody else might be duplicating your content, getting their own page in the A-List. You can use a service like Copyscape to find infringers and shut them down.

Put your robots.txt to work. This file talks to search engines. It can tell Google not to index parts of your site that might contain duplicate content, such as print versions of articles. In addition, there are several WordPress pages you might want to block.

Add more content. Pages with little or no content can end up in supplemental results, because Google doesn’t think they’re valuable. Beef up the content, impress Google, and provide more value to visitors.

Direct all requests to www. For most servers, “domain.com” and “www.domain.com” bring up the exact same page. Google could consider this duplicate content, since two URLs bring up the same page (for your entire site). A simple server tweak can redirect all requests to either www or no-www.

Write unique title and meta tags. If every page of your site is titled “My Site,” you’re not as well positioned for the A-List. Tailor every title, description, and keyword tag to the actual content for each page.

Make your site shallow. How many levels deep is your site? In other words, how many clicks away from the home page does it take to get to the lowest peon web page? If it’s more than 2 or 3, you’re not passing enough link juice to your pages. Simplifying the architecture will please Google and your visitors.

Use search-friendly URLs. Google isn’t a fan of long, complicated URLS. Make them reasonably short and actually readable. Instead of “domain.com/?adfasd=09098″ use “domain.com/page”

Report a page to Google. Andy Beard took an interesting approach to supplemental results. He reported one of his own pages to Google as a paid link. It ended up pulling all his pages out of supplemental results.

Create a sitemap & submit it. You’ve got to tell Google where your pages are, especially if you’ve changed things following these tips. Make a new sitemap and submit it for Google to index. You’ll find the webmaster tools helpful with this.

Any more questions?

What have we left out of this guide? Is something not clear? That’s what the comments are for.

We’d love to talk over issues you might have and help other people with supplemental results problems. Let the conversation begin.

We focus on marketing your small business on the internet, and you’ve probably got a website setup for that purpose. But is your website the best it can possibly be?

For a quick list of website improvement ideas, check out a new article from Fadtastic: 25 Ways To Improve Your Site Today (via Blogging Pro). This list includes ideas from SEO all the way to off-line development.

One of my favorite tips is about usability & navigation:

Click here: Why? Change this phrase everywhere on your site. It doesn’t make sense out of context. The user has to read the whole paragraph (which they probably won’t) to understand why they should click there. Consider phrases like “Download the profit/loss graph” or “Listen to the podcast entitled food for thought.”

Not only does “click here” confuse users, but it also doesn’t help the search rankings for your site. Using keyword phrases in your links will enable quick navigation and improve your site’s search traffic.

Be sure to check out the other 24 tips from Fadtastic and see which website improvement ideas you can implement.

Plexis POS Review plus lots of information on other POS software packages.

Does your website show up in search engine listings? If you can’t find it, neither can your customers. Lucky for you, there are easy steps to take that will solve this problem.

This is Part 1 in a series on the basics of search engines and what you can do to make your site findable. It’s easy; I promise.

Where is my site?!

I was recently contacted by a panicked organization. Their website did not show up in search engine listings, but their competitor did. In fact, if you searched for the group’s site, you found the competitor.

After a little investigation, I explained the problem. Their site was not developed with any consideration for search engines. It looked nice and had good content, but it wasn’t findable.

If you’re in a similar boat, keep reading. Search Engines 101 will teach you the basics to get your website on the map. It’s written in plain English with thorough explanations. Let’s get started!

Think like a robot

Search engines are robots. They’re increasingly smarter, but they are still dumb compared to humans. Your website must spell everything out for them.

More importantly, these robots can only read text. Images and fancy animations get ignored by search engines. But that’s OK, because we’ll go through the key things your website needs.

Put up a big sign

Brick and mortar businesses have big signs, right? Your website needs one!

Look up at the top of your web browser and read the text that is displayed in the title bar. This is called the “title” for the page. You can change what it says. Sadly, many website designers forget this important step. The title might be something like “home” or jibberish letters.

Your website’s title should contain something like you’d put on a real-life sign. You’ll want your website name, along with a short description or witty slogan.

Here’s how you change your website’s title. You can open your page in an HTML editor and change the title with the menus (FrontPage instructions). Or you can simply edit the HTML directly, by pasting this code in between the “head” tags (they should be at the top of the page):

<title>Your Title Text Goes Here</title>

Remember that every page on your site has its own title, so you can customize the title for each page’s content. In fact you should do this. Tell the robots what that page contains!

Describe your content

After your sign is in place, you need to give search engines more information about each page. This info is put in “meta tags.” That’s just a techie name for little descriptors of your content.

There are two descriptors for every web page. First, you need to write out an actual description. Make it a simple sentence or a couple phrases. Maybe something like, “Bob’s Doorknob Shop sells custom and special-order knobs in Richmond and Henrico County.” Easy, right?

The second descriptor is called your page’s key words. These are words and phrases that describe the page’s content. To help think of these, put yourself in a potential customer’s position: what terms would you enter into a search engine? Make a list of key words and phrases, including different spelling variations. Don’t forget geographic terms that might be important, like cities and counties you serve, etc.

Your website editor can now update your “meta tags” for you, or you can edit them yourself. You should add this code directly below your “title” tags from the previous section:

<meta name="description" content="Your Description Goes Here" />
<meta name="keywords" content="Your Key Words Go Here, Separated By Commas" />

Just like every page has its own title, they all have descriptions and key words as well. These will definitely help you be found.

Feed the robots text

The search engine robots are hungry for your text. Like I mentioned, they ignore images and animation. If your content is all done in Flash or graphics, the robots can’t find it very well, even with your titles and descriptions.

The best way around this is to make the heart of your content plain text. You can spice it up with colors and different fonts if you want, but keep the foundation basic.

Now it’s time to make sure your site is designed in this manner. If it’s not, you can always add some extra text at the bottom of the page that describes your content. Don’t go overboard, but a little bit can help. Just make sure to integrate your additions into the overall site.

Stay tuned for more

Now you’ve got a great start on making your site findable. What you’ve done so far is considered part of the “on page” optimization process. It’s about making sure the site itself is ready to be found. In Part 2, we’ll start looking at things you need to do in other places.

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